Dual Boot Installs + 64/32 bit?

Hey everyone, my new laptop is on the way "X50 novatech MV" I was torn between XP Pro and Vista Home Premium! I talked to my brother, and he hates Vista due to it being a resource hog and some other silly reasons, basically XP is much better, an opinion of his many share, but I find more people edging towards Vista these days.

He said, "I've got a Vista disk lying around here, I can put dual boot so you can try both!" I thought great! I could save a load of money and I was curious to mess around with games on both Vista and XP, to see how they compare etc, then I could choose a preferred OS. Basically to sum it up,

Question 1: If I installed say Crysis or Halo 2, or any software "FireFox, Itunes", would that install on XP aswell? like data would transfer over and it could be compatable for XP? or am I asking a silly question?

Question 2: Is 64bit Vista better than 32bit? performance wise in gaming as you can use more ram? would it be suiting for me?

Thanks everyone, please excuse me sounding dumb If I am!

 

1. NO, It will be like 2 different worlds, separate drivers, separate OS, separate everything....the only time you are going to see both of the OSs together is at the Boot Loader....Both will be NTFS, so you can copy data from one drive to another....but drivers and software that are only compatible with vista, will not work on XP.... (If you want to play crysis on both vista and xp, you will have to install them on both the OSs separately)

2. Yes, 64-bit is better, and it is the future; but keep in mind driver and software support..!! You can install 4GB ram or more, but normally ram and cpu are not the bottleneck in gaming, it is the gpu that the games depend upon..!! But overall, x64 is a bit faster than x86-32....(difference is not 'huge')

 

Ahh noo! So that means a double install of Crysis? lame!

Hmm, I'll need to discuss that with my brother, I think he's using 32bit Vista but I'll need to check!

Thanks angad!